By the time I got to high school, the rules began to break down. My junior year, the last I had to take shop, I took a second full year of drafting, and we actually had two girls in the class. The teacher, an old style geezer, simply couldn’t deal with them. He was simply stunned when they showed up. He compensated by ignoring them the entire year. He graded their projects and tests, but nothing else. He wouldn’t even talk to them.
Drafting had always proved useful to me. I had worked in several jobs where the ability to read blueprints and do design work proved quite helpful. I learned enough in wood shop to make a crappy wooden stool and know which end of the hammer was which. Metal shop was a disaster, since everything we used was either blistering hot or razor sharp, or both, and the only projects we made were totally useless. Of course, a lot of the guys ended up making high school versions of prison shivs, which for some of them would prove good training for the future.
When the typing teacher refused to let me in, I simply went down to the office and saw Mr. Butterfield. He also refused to let me in, with the same argument. I very calmly asked what the legal reason was. As soon as he heard the word ‘legal’ his ears pricked up and he stared at me.
“It’s the rules!” he sputtered.
I set the paper back down on his desk and marked a big X where he was supposed to sign. “Mr. Butterfield, please, just sign here.”
He turned bright red and spluttered some more, than grabbed a pen and scrawled his name angrily. I left quickly, not wanting to push my luck. I marched right back to the typing class and handed Mrs. Wakerman the paper. She stared at it and wordlessly pointed me towards an empty desk to the side. The typewriter was a decrepit and ancient manual Royal model, but it worked, mostly. I managed to get some time on some of the IBM electrics as well during the course.
This class was a little tougher. Typing on a keyboard is a snap compared to using a typewriter. Make a mistake and you have to go over it with a correcting ribbon. There’s only one font. No spell checker or grammar checker. No automatic centering. No automatic line return. And you have to do it all blind, because your eyes aren’t on the screen, but to the side, reading what you are trying to type. They call this touch typing, probably because afterwards you’re touched in the head.
Still, I got a decent enough grade the first time, and while Mrs. Wakerman wasn’t happy, she was fair. I got a decent grade this time, too. Even better, I got to hang out with a bunch of pretty girls, and didn’t have to make prison shivs with a bunch of ugly guys. I promised Mrs. Wakerman I would sign up for Home Economics next year, which made her apoplectic and the girls giggly.
I didn’t have much grief from my male classmates, though. For one thing, after the fight on the bus, I got a wide berth from anybody interested in bullying me. For another thing, well, like I said, I got to hang out with some awfully pretty girls in class, which was a pretty big deal at 13 or 14. I wasn’t anywhere near as nervous about girls this time around. If the girls weren’t interested in me, and let’s face it, they weren’t, they often told me which guy they were interested in, and I could drop subtle hints (’Asshole, I am telling you, she’d like to go to the dance with you! Get with the program!’) in the proper direction. I had a rather subtle power over my compatriots.
Okay, I had my fair share of hormones rampaging as well, but as a midget 13 year old, I couldn’t buy a handjob from a hooker, let alone a dance invitation with a girl. The first time, I didn’t get anywhere until I was 14, next year. This time looked to be the same. I jerked off in the bathroom at home occasionally. Oh well.
I managed to make it to First Class in Boy Scouts as well. I liked Scouting, and was involved from Cub Scouts, up through Boy Scouts, and then transferred over to the Explorers. Later, when Parker was old enough, I registered him as a Cub Scout and I became a Scout Leader. He actually made Eagle, and I had just about every rank in the book, ending as an Assistant Scoutmaster.
At the time, however, I only cared about the camping. I cared nothing about ranks or merit badges, even though I learned enough to qualify for a shitload of them. I never made it above First Class, and the Explorers simply don’t have ranks. They have job titles, and they consider themselves elite anyway.
Hamilton couldn’t hack it and dropped out after a year. He hated the hazing all first year scouts get. The final straw for Ham had been when he was diagnosed with the dread disease ‘ear lobes’, which required the bottom half of his ears to be painted with mercurochrome. I actually enjoyed it, and then dished it out when I was older. In later years Scouting became all politically correct, and hazing wasn’t considered nurturing and progressive. I remember one camporee where a buddy of mine and I spent two hours being sent from one campsite to another in search of a left-handed monkey wrench. I don’t recall it leaving me feeling un-nurtured. Nobody ever died from searching for smoke shifters (keeps the smoke out of your eyes at campfires), skyhooks (to hold your tent up if the pole breaks), tent-stretchers (obviously to stretch your tent), or a hundred feet of shoreline. Likewise, sending a bunch of 10 and 11 year old boys into the woods with a stick and a bag to catch snipes (they actually exist, but not in the woods) is an excellent means to burn off their energy. Snipe-hunting was a time honored tradition in the Boy Scouts of the Sixties and Seventies.
I loved it. Between Boy Scouts and the church youth group Pastor Joe took camping, I could count on a camping trip every month, rain or shine, no matter what the season. I liked it and I was good at it. I had all the gear, and when I moved to the Explorers it just got better. Explorer posts specialize in something. Many specialize as police or EMT or firefighter auxiliaries, but the one I joined specialized in canoeing and camping. By the time I went to college, I was an expert, and could confidently tackle Class V whitewater rivers. I even had a waterproof World War II surplus UDT diver’s backpack for keeping my stuff dry in rough water. It was a seriously cool Post.
The major change that happened in the summer of 1969 involved a major remodeling of the house. Nana, my mother’s mother, was moving in. This was somewhat of a mixed blessing the first time around, and I suspected it would be this time also.
Pop-pop, Mom’s father, had died when I was twelve, almost two years ago. He and Nana lived in Baltimore, in the Highlandtown area, which is where Mom grew up. They were a real pair of characters. He was at least ten years older than Nana, was from London, and around the turn of the century had run away from home and gone to sea on a whaling ship. For the rest of his life he earned a living from the sea. One winter he got snowed in at Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. During World War II he had been a civilian deep sea diver for the Navy, moving mines around ports. After the war he had his own deep sea salvage yard. I remember his deep sea diving suit and helmet down in the basement of the house. He kept a double-decker pigeon coop in the backyard for racing pigeons.
Nana was a crusty old battleaxe, born around the turn of the century. Her parents were German, and came here during the massive immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her parents must have found a way to get busy on the boat, because she was born about 8½ months after they arrived. She used to make beer in the bathtub during Prohibition.
Anyway, Pop-pop was sailing a different sea these days, and Nana still had the place in Highlandtown. Last year, during the riots in Baltimore after Martin Luther King was killed, Dad had me get dressed in case he and I had to go into the city to rescue her. It didn’t have to be done, but it got my mother very nervous. She was going to come out to live with us. If ever I wondered whether my father loved my mother, this was the ultimate proof he did; the old bat could be cantankerous as hell! Every week she would buy the National Enquirer, the worst of the tabloids, and she believed every word, because ‘it’s a newspaper!’ Because of that, we didn’t need to spend all that money sending men to the moon, because the aliens were actually landing somewhere in New Mexico. Besides which, all those rocket launches interrupted the soap operas she set her life by.